The End of Grocery Shopping

How supermarkets are evolving in the age of algorithms and apps

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I got married in a grocery store. My local grocer, Potsothy “Pots” Sallapa, upon hearing of my engagement, insisted that we hold the wedding in his shop. My fiancée thought it sounded crazy at first — I remember her saying something about not wanting our photos to feature a stack of cereal boxes. But the store was a cozy place and near the apartment we shared at the time, and she agreed to at least give it a look with fresh eyes. As we toured the high-ceilinged, woodbeamed store, among Saturday-morning crowds stocking up on grapes and granola, I could see on her face that this wasn’t just a place people went to acquire toilet paper: it was a community hub. A few months later, we walked down the store’s central aisle and got married between the cash register, the root-vegetable table, a group of our friends and family, and a display of maple syrup.

Granted, this is the kind of experience that was available to us because we lived, back then, in a neighbourhood full of such places: Kensington Market, a part of Toronto that, in spite of gentrification’s constant momentum, exists today as a place where people can shop for food the same way they did 100 years ago. In the course of an ordinary week, I would pop into separate stores for my meat, fish, bread, cheese, dried goods, and vegetables. In every shop, I knew someone by name.

Not everyone holds their wedding in a grocery store, or can, but it’s not an unusual desire: a spokesperson for Sobeys told me the company gets a few requests a year from customers who want to get married in one of its locations. At the very least, the supermarket is a formative place. It’s where most of us first experience the collision of personal independence and financial responsibility: that initial grocery shop after moving out of our parents’ home, the sticker shock of how much cheese and cookies cost leaving us rattled and unsure of how prepared we were for adulthood. It’s where, perhaps, we think about the ethics of how we shop, or decide what we want to teach our kids about healthy eating, or try to reconstruct an old family recipe. You don’t have to hold a major life event in a grocery store to appreciate the profound role such places can have in our lives.

The way Canadians get their food is changing. Our grocery industry — which currently employs over 300,000 people and is valued at $97.5 billion according to Canadian Grocer — is in an arms race to modernize for a digital era. More and more customers expect the convenience of needing to think far less about their groceries, and work less to get them, than they ever have before. What’s less clear is the ripple effects this will have on our daily lives, our communities, our health, and our workforces.

The first front in this campaign is online ordering and delivery. This is, for the moment, only a small slice of the market: about 1.5 percent in Canada and 3 percent in the US. But industry analysts expect it to grow rapidly, possibly quadrupling by 2023 — a conservative estimate, according to the Food Marketing Institute, which predicts that 70 percent of US consumers will do at least some grocery shopping online within four years. Even the more modest growth projections represent billions of dollars in sales for

Canada’s 24,000 grocery stores. And this trajectory leaves the big three supermarket chains — Loblaws, Sobeys, and Metro, which share 63.4 percent of the market between them — in a tough place, facing existential threats from Walmart, which they can’t beat for price, and Amazon, which they can’t beat for convenience.

Amazon’s 2017 purchase of upscale supermarket chain Whole Foods, for $13.7 billion (US), was possibly the biggest industry news of the last decade, signalling that the online behemoth was embarking on a major push into groceries. As of last October, some Amazon Prime members in the United States get free grocery delivery, and last November, the company announced plans for its first branded, physical grocery store.

This was hardly the only recent development in supermarket shopping. Also this past fall, PC Express, which already has hundreds of grocery-pickup points across the country, opened its first stand-alone “store,” which contains no aisles of food; parent company Loblaws announced the construction of a 12,000-squarefoot “automatic picking facility” to harness robotics in the quest for efficiency; and Sobeys started test driving “the first intelligent shopping cart [in] Canadian grocery stores,” which scans, weighs, and tallies your purchases as you go. And, in October, Uber announced it was acquiring a majority stake in Cornershop, a leading grocery platform in Mexico and Chile, which currently serves fourteen Toronto-area stores and promises delivery “in as quick as 60 minutes” — upping the ante on the next-day and same-day delivery services Canadians are still getting used to.

The rate of change is only increasing. Amazon’s Chinese counterpart, Alibaba, already has 150 locations of Hema, a supermarket that featuresfacial-recognition software, real-time pricing (digital price tags that adjust based on factors like supply and demand), automated checkout, app payment, and thirty-minute delivery. The service is so efficient that 60 percent of the company’s customers are already ordering online. Then there is the host of other experimental efforts to streamline the shopping experience for consumers: 7Fresh (no cash), Amazon Go (no staff), and a horde of delivery meal-kit companies (no shopping). In the US, Walgreens and Kroger are experimenting with facial-recognition software that can target in-store ads at customers based on age, gender, or mood.

General Electric begins selling a “simplified icing unit”— the

first all-steel refrigerator.

King Kullen, generally regarded as the world’s first supermarket, opens in Queens, New York.

Sylvan Goldman introduces the shopping cart, a new device he invented for his Humpty Dumpty chain

of stores.

American courts issue an antitrust ruling against A&P, which was charged with engaging in monopolistic practices. This does little to slow the growth of supermarket chains.

1950s

Larger stores with larger parking lots proliferate during post– Second World

War suburbanization.

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